Q: Your most recent book, Time Bend, is a work on memory. Your two works - "All My Sons" and "Death of a Salesman" made you famous. In these plays, memory is not only an object, but also a form. Can you talk about what memory means to a writer like you and how it produces your work?
A: The way I write the script is like a bird coming home to rest. It's a Greek way. Memory plays an important role in such a form.
There is almost no shadow of the past in the United States today, and the form of drama is more like a movie. And in movies, we rarely ask about a character's past.
History, to people, is the most mysterious. I have tried to think about what people would be like at different stages of history: what would I be like if I grew up without Hitler and without the Great Depression?
I ask this because when I look back I always realize: Our generation has been distorted by history. No matter what we do in this country, we are always faster than anyone else. This country is also a pioneer on the road to the abyss. We can do good or bad, but we are always the first.
In the United States, one of the biggest exports is not steel, nor goods, but culture. America gets more money from cultural exports than anything else. That means we are the ones who make the years, for better or worse. That doesn't mean we're less confused than anyone else, just that the way we do things is a little more modern. But fundamentally, the things that need attention are the same everywhere.
Q: Do you think life in a tragic scene is another way of describing the state of America we're talking about? Is the purpose of writing to accelerate the sense of tragedy in people's hearts?
A: A critic in the 20th century once said: There is no tragic creation in America. This critic says we have too many opportunities to escape from reality rather than to suffer.
O'Neal wrote a letter saying that if that were all true, it would be a damning slander for America and the American character, because it means we have lost our desire for meaning in life.
"We're pretty content with drifting from one place to another, doing things that don't make much sense," O'Neal said. It's true that it's hard for us to create tragedies, but we create the most famous tragedies because we're better at fantasizing than anyone else.
We are perhaps the only country that is really trying to write tragedy. If we only knew how to organize, use, and represent tragedy, we would also have the power to ask questions like: Why live? What's the point of everything? These are the most famous tragic questions. To face them, you need enormous courage and guts. You have to have the courage of a madman. Tragedy doesn't go with a culture of prudence; it goes with a culture of madness, like ours.
I don't think everyone is isolated, and literature, the work that theater does add up is just for the pleasure of the artist and to divert people from the real world. This is why I feel that there is no escape, that we should think about politics, think about society.
I hate to mention the fact that the problem of values only comes to the fore when there is a war. If a soldier betrayed, we don't argue about his reckless behavior. We're not the first civilization to get this far, but I hope it's just a short trip.
Q: You grew up in the Jewish Quarter of New York City. But when reading your drama, I found very little about Jews. Have you ever made a definite decision not to write about your family in Jewish terms, and what is your attitude towards this involvement?
A: The first drama I wrote was about my family. Regardless of what the critics said, this autobiographical element was later dropped, and I don't think it was a wise decision. I think everyone has the same thing, and as I have had more and more experiences around the world, I have found that there is little reason to differentiate them based on their ethical background. In dramas like "All My Sons", "Death of a Salesman", I don't think if they were Catholic, Protestant, they would make any difference.
For the past 30 years, I have discussed Jewish issues openly. Of all the characters, my favorite is The Price, a furniture dealer and a Jew.
A few years ago, I broke my ankle in Egypt, so I couldn't walk around freely. Our boat stops here and there for a while along the Nile. I can sit on the boat and talk to the locals. One day, in the distance, I saw a man galloping over, a man on horseback in uniform. He jumped off his horse and rushed to me eagerly, and said, "Are you Mr. Miller?" I said, "Yes." He added, "I'm the chief of police on this part of the Nile, and I want to ask you something. Question." I said, "Okay." He said, "Is it hard to write a play?" I said, "Yeah, why ask that? Do you want to write a screenplay?" And he said, "You know we've just been in our The Price was in the magazine.” I said, “The Price was in the police magazine?” He said, “There’s a cop in the script. The cop in the script is pretty much the same as the real cops like us.”
You ask me why there are no Jews? I think, there should be, there are many kinds of people.
My problem is that I can't connect myself to the current religion. I always thought there was a special kind of communication between me and God. I didn't have to go out of my way to comfort him; we made eye contact with each other.
Q: Can you talk about the Chinese version of "Death of a Salesman"? We always talk about drama on a limited scale, giving Americans the dilemma between success and failure in dramatic form. It's as if the problems are all from America. But how do Chinese talk about drama?
A: The only difference in the response to "Death of a Salesman" in China is that they thought Willie Loman should be a woman. In China, it is mothers who send their children into society and tell them what to accomplish. But aside from that, the response can be said to be exactly the same.
I think we always take the superficial phenomena of life as fundamental things, such as etiquette. For example, in China, even if he is very close to his father, he would not call him pal. Accepting similar informal practices in France is also somewhat difficult. But "Death of a Salesman" was starred by a famous French actor and took the country by storm.
We differ in our language and the way we express things, but what we express is fundamentally the same: life in one word – overwhelmed. We use our lives to learn how to live: how to deal with various problems in life, how to raise small children. Solve questions about justice, how to achieve justice without being a dictator.
Q: Your entire life has been distorted by something in the 20th century, and in your work you often refer to despair and a feeling that life is a failure. Do you have any beliefs? In desperation, where do you find the strength to continue your writing?
A: In order to write sad dramas, I had to learn to be happy about something. Writing a book review for The New York Times I realized that we are always trying to explain the same thing to everyone. Painful chapters fill us with fantasies that create despair. Truth makes hope possible. When I see the truth, I become full of hope and strength arises spontaneously.
Great plays have fantasy, reality, belief, and the absence of belief. But you can handle it just fine without faith in this country. You have to believe that the stock market can make money. Other than that, we don't need to go to any extremes.
In the past when we walked into the theater, we used to complain about the smallness of the theater. There we faced Hitler, went through the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War just happened, and what did we get? We got tragedy, a kind of theater nonsense. The problem is still there. The difference is that the belief in which we changed it no longer exists.
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